Bobbi Kristina Brown undergoes tracheotomy; Nick Gordon wants to see her

Bobbi Kristina Brown remains in critical condition after having the breathing tube that was down her throat replaced by a tube running into a hole in her trachea, according to reports out Thursday.

After having what was described as a normal procedure given the length of time she had spent on a ventilator, the 21-year-old’s condition “remains the same,” a family source told People. “It’s a waiting game. The family is hoping and waiting.”

The procedure was done to prevent infection around the tube, a source told NBC News.

The fact that a tracheotomy was needed was “making things clear to everyone how serious this is,” a second family source told People. “Even if she wakes up, there’s a possibility that this could do some damage to her vocal cords, I hear.”

The only daughter of the late Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown has been hospitalized in a medically induced coma since Jan. 31, when she was found unconscious and face-down in a bathtub at the Atlanta-area home she shares with Nick Gordon. Police have been conducting a criminal investigation regarding that day’s events and the circumstances leading up to them.

Though Bobbi Kristina Brown has called the 25-year-old Gordon her husband, her father’s attorney said recently that the two were never legally married. Gordon, who was taken in by Houston as a child and raised along with Bobbi Kristina, was at the house when she was found and has not been at her bedside, supposedly due to family conflicts.

“Nick has been trying, privately, to do everything he can to see Bobbi Kristina cooperatively,” Gordon’s attorneys, Randall M. Kessler and Joe S. Habachy, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “He has respected the family’s wishes and for that reason alone has not returned to the hospital and risked a public confrontation.

“But he desperately wants to be with the one he loves and continues to hope that his request will be granted.”

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